


Out of the Maze

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Captivity Flashbacks, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-07 22:52:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15917904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Jesse is free. At least, he thinks he is.





	Out of the Maze

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Breaking Bad, and I make no money from this.

Jesse places his hands in his lap and tries not to twitch, but it’s hard. He has to keep his head down so they won’t recognize him. They hadn’t asked for his ID at the bus station, and that was good. 

He’s been shaking so hard he could barely get the words out, but the woman behind the counter hadn’t cared at all.

Maybe he could have gotten a job like that. Maybe he could have typed in destinations and printed out tickets and said “Thanks for riding with Martz, you have a great day now” but instead he’s a shell, and it’s his own damn fault. 

So he’ll go off to be nothing at all. He’ll figure something out and he’ll live day by day but he doesn’t know how. Maybe he will never know how again.

He climbs in on the padded seat and looks at the chips bag that’s been stuffed in the seat next to him and he wants to cry because it’s the most comfortable place he’s sat in the last six months. And because he can feel the grip of the chain around his neck, still, like a phantom pain he can’t shake.

It almost feels like it should be that way, that it should stay that way. Like he’s walking around without a pair of glasses he needs or like he left a walker at home and he needs to hobble down the aisle of a nursing home. 

He certainly feels older. The other Jesse still appears in his dreams, and sometimes that’s who he is. But he feels like another man, a boy really. Someone who didn’t understand.

Understand what – well, that’s the question, and there are thousands of different answers he could give. 

“Mommy, how long will the bus ride be?” asks a little boy sitting behind Jesse.

Jesse wonders where his mother is right now. _She’s probably just starting dinner… or is it breakfast? What time is it?_

Jesse shuts his eyes and tries to sleep.

***

When he sleeps, that’s when the dreams come. That’s when the chain is tied tight around his neck and he can’t breathe in for more than a second before Todd pulls it taut. He looks at him with an expression of such guilelessness that Jesse almost wants to please him in a way. In the dreams, that is.

In reality… He can’t remember. It’s hard to place himself back in the mind-space in a way that makes sense. Everything is a blur and suddenly it’s like he’s there, but everything is so jumbled that he can’t get a grip on it. 

When he awakes, he’s shivering, and he has to bite down to keep from crying out. He can remember the way Todd’s hands felt on his shoulder when he held him in place, the brass knuckles crushing into his face as they asked him about what he knew about the DEA and what the DEA knew about them.

He’s not in the dark and damp of the grate, however – he’s in the backmost seat of a bus, sitting on a gray, torn seat with some of the stuffing ripped out, and it’s such a relief that he’s sure he’ll start crying and then…

So he swallows it back down and gazes out the window, trying not to hear the footsteps in his head that meant that Todd was making his way down the ladder. Trying not to remember the way Uncle Jack (Jesse can’t believe he still thinks of him like that, like he’s his own uncle or some fucked up shit like that) used to sing out with new ideas on how to screw with “the rat”. 

His arms being stretched out, pulled taut. The way his voice had seemed like it didn’t belong to him.

The way it still doesn’t, now. It feels like he shouldn’t even have a voice – who would he talk to, anyway? Who would want to listen?

He’ll go to Alaska, maybe, or maybe that was just a pipe dream. It was a nice one, at least. He could bundle up in a parka and watch people ice fish. It could be, in some bizarre way, a little bit fun, even.

***

They transfer in St. Louis and he climbs off the bus, wrapping his arms around himself. He does that a lot these days; he couldn’t get his hands fully around himself in chains so he has to do it now, trying to grab comfort that he’s not sure he deserves.

He thinks of his parents back in Albuquerque and wonders if they ever still think about him. Do they think he’s dead at the bottom of a pit somewhere?  
And maybe, in a way, he is. Maybe he never left the compound and this is all a mirage, a dream about to end. He shakes his head – he can’t allow himself to think like that, or he’ll go crazy. Mr. White was there, really in the flesh that time, and he knew it to be true because Mr. White in his dreams was either his savior, come to welcome him to freedom, or a harbinger of doom come to pull him into hell. This Mr. White had been neither. He’d just been a sad old man trying to go out on top so he didn’t quietly slip away and Jesse didn’t know what to do with that; he still doesn’t.

He guesses that Mr. White is dead; that even though Jesse refused to shoot him that the man had bled out.

Jesse knows him well enough by now – or knew him, or…

He can’t keep thinking about it, can’t keep picturing him. If he’s going to survive, he needs to push Mr. White and the chains and the dog run out of his mind and just act goddamned normal but it’s getting more impossible by the second. He finds himself staring at a vending machine, trying to decide if he wants an RC Cola. He realizes that he probably can’t afford one, and that nearly sets him off into a complete sobbing breakdown.

He just needs to get control of himself long enough to get to Alaska.

***

***

He doesn’t make it to Alaska, but he makes it to Des Moines. Someone on the bus informs him that it was just voted the best place to live in the whole country.  
Jesse isn’t sure if he deserves to live in the best place in the country, but he figures the compound would count as one of the worst, so he’s willing to take a shot.  
He climbs aboard a local bus, though he’s not sure where he’s going. It had been easy in Albuquerque that time, looking through ads until he found the one Jane had placed.

It's harder to conjure up her face, but he can still hear her laugh, the way it had echoed through the duplex.

The way it had faded into dust, all because of Mr. White again. Again, and again, and again, Mr. White killing everything that Jesse loved. Again and again and over again. 

He doesn’t think he’ll find another Jane in Des Moines. That had been his mistake – reaching out, trying to attach himself to someone else. Trying to find peace when he wasn’t sure he deserved any.

He finds a spot under the bridge in the western part of the city, quiet and, other than an lady with only one leg who sleeps in a wheelchair, vacant.  
He curls up in a spot, figuring he might have to invest in some kind of a blanket.

Then again, it isn’t like he had had one before… he shouldn’t miss it as much as he does. 

It’s cold – what month is it, even? It seemed like six months, give or take, since he had entered the grate, but time is tricky these days.

Time can lie.

***

_“I don’t think…” Jesse could barely get the words out before Jack clapped him hard on the back again. At least it wasn’t the ribs this time; he was sure one had to be broken or at least bruised. He could remember the last time he’d broken his ribs, after Tuco had beat him up. He’d ended up in a hospital that time._

_No such luck._

_“You’re not here to think, rat,” Jack snarled, and the next thing Jesse knew his head was back against the tank and his neck was burning; his chains were burning._

_He screamed. It didn’t sound like him. Then again, he didn’t know what he sounded like much anymore. There had been a Jesse once but he felt like a family picture on the wall, taken at Sears but not a real person, just a fantasy._

_Jack released him to the floor and snorted._

_“Next time, when Toddy wants something, Toddy gets it. I don’t want to have to be the referee for this shit.”_

_Jesse’s head was throbbing._

_All he could do was get low to the ground and submit, submit, submit…_

***

“Are you all right?” 

Jesse awakes, slowly, realizing he must have slept with his head against a rock embankment. How did he end up here? How far did he wander from the little spot under the bridge?

The voice speaking, Jesse realizes slowly, belongs to a tiny teenage girl who is standing over him. Her hair is long and red, pulled awkwardly into a long, messy ponytail. 

“I’m fine,” he tries to say, but only comes out with a soft groan. “Sorry, I’ll get out of your way,” he manages a second later, lifting himself from the ground and trying to brush off his pants. It seems like the kind of thing he is supposed to do, but he's been dirty for so long he knows that it doesn’t matter how much he tries, he is never going to get clean ever again.

 _Our rat. Our nice little pet rat._ Todd and Jack had said it almost with affection. A rat running a wheel, or was that hamsters? Jesse couldn’t even keep the images in his head straight anymore. Jake had had a hamster, maybe, or a gerbil. Maybe he should have paid better attention.

“You can stay,” the girl tells him. “You look like you could use the rest.” She plops down beside him. “You ain’t in my way, trust me.” She pulls out a brown paper bag and takes a drink out of it.

“How old are you?” Jesse asks her.

“Old enough,” she says and snorts. “You must be new. You don’t seem like you’re from around here.”

“I’m new in town,” Jesse says, threading his arms through each other and curling in tight. “I just got here…” Today? Yesterday? What is time anymore?

There was a watch Jesse’s mother had always loved, a big silver shiny one that Jesse’s father had given her for their anniversary when Jesse was thirteen.

Jake had just been born, lying in his crib, perfect and peaceful in every way.

Jesse had opened a drawer and found the watch, had lifted it up to see how all the little springs worked together to make the tick-tick-ticking of time.

Then he had heard his mother’s shriek, her accusation that he was stealing it.

Two years later, he pawned it to buy a pound of weed.

Jesse had been nothing if not predictable, after all.

***

He finds work at a little restaurant in a town called Waterloo. It’s not a pleasant town, exactly – he hears people around him disparaging it every chance they get – but it’s not the grate and some days, Jesse has decided, you have to take what you can get.

He washes dishes, cleans off silverware, lives off of split tips and moves into a cot in the local shelter.

It’s better than the grate.

Someone tosses him a newspaper that tells him that Walter White is dead. He doesn’t know what to do – is he meant to cry, to mourn? Is he meant to laugh, even, to be glad that the cause of all his misery is dumped in a grave that no one will ever visit?

He could visit it, he tells himself once he comes down from the liquid headiness of it all. He could go back to Albuquerque and lay flowers at the site, because no one else will. 

It’s a sobering thought. Jesse doesn’t like sobering thoughts these days.

And anyway, he can’t go back; not ever again, so Mr. White will be left alone.

***

He doesn’t expect to run into anyone from his old life (okay, that’s a lie, he is greeted in his nightmares by Gus walking over to him with parts of him falling off, and Gale pleading as he grips his hand, and Todd’s cold dead eyes, but that’s only at night, at least most of the time). 

He does expect, sometimes, to be recognized. That someone would have seen him on America’s Most Wanted and called it in, looking for some huge reward. The joke is probably on them – he looks years, maybe decades, older. Even his own parents might never recognize him.

He hadn’t thought about his parents in a very long time, hadn’t allowed them to cross his mind when he had been in the compound. 

_They’ll get them too. They’ll take them and lock them up here, my mother, my father, and Jake too, and they’ll kill them, just like Todd killed Drew Sharp, just like…_

_I don’t have parents,_ Jesse had decided, _I’m an orphan. Or maybe I was born in a lab, created by Walter White and made in his image, and now I’ve been put back on the cutting room floor because I’m defective. Maybe I’m an android who felt too hard and so they left me on some other planet._

And then he would fade into the metalwork, let himself fall apart and recombine, be a cog in the machine of the lab. 

_If Mr. White had to die, this is how he would want to go,_ he thought sometimes as he would hear the chemicals rattling around in the settling tanks. This lab had been so filthy, nothing like the pristine super lab.

But they had a lot in common when they were both spotted with blood. 

He won’t think about that right now, not when he has this new life, whatever it is. He won’t think about it…

He sits, washing dishes and looking at the curves of the ceramic, knowing how breakable it all is. How breakable people are, too; he never thought he’d have to sit down just to scrub pancake residue off of a plate, but standing for too long makes him feel exhausted now and his manager seemed to feel bad for him.

“Jesse?”

His head jerks up because that’s not his name now, of course. He can’t remember what his name is supposed to be, though.

His heart stops when he sees her. She’s a few years older but she looks the same. Her hair is still blonde and she’s still dressed like she’s about to stop off at a PTA meeting and complain about the kids standing on her lawn and killing the grass. 

When he meets her eyes, she stares at him for a long time. 

“Who?” Jesse asks, making his eyes blank, the way he was in the compound, the way he faded away. No use in being a man if you’re tied to a dog run. Just turn it all off. 

“Oh.” Janet Pinkman shakes her head and lets out a nervous, disturbed chuckle. “You looked like… someone I used to know, for a second. Sorry to bother you.”

She turns and walks out of the restaurant, and Jesse wants to run after her and ask to come home.

He holds back. What good would it do either one of them?

***

Jesse finds time in the middle of the night to work with the blocks of wood he’s picked up cheap at the local Lowe’s; the manager seems to like him since he brings all the carts back at the end of the night for a few extra bucks, so he gives him a good deal.

He carves a tiny, intricate German Shepherd and boxes it up with a card, addresses it to Brock, care of the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department. 

_Dear Brock,_ he writes in a shaky hand. _I’m sorry. I hope you like this. Please have a wonderful life – you deserve it._

He doesn’t sign it. He stands in line at the post office and watches it slide out into a chute, out into the world.

And then he walks back home.


End file.
